Mike White | Year of the Dog / 2007

the unordinary obsessions of ordinary lives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike White (screenwriter and director) Year of the Dog / 2007

 

In Year of the Dog an ordinary secretary, Peggy (a part written by scriptwriter Mike White for actress Molly Shannon) lives a regular, if uneventful, life, stopping on her way to the office to purchase donuts for her fellow workers, regularly visiting her brother and his wife, mindful always to bring gifts for their two children. Her warm and inviting home is filled with the energy of her young pet dog, Pencil.

     We quickly recognize, however, that the thoughtfulness of this woman and her seeming joy in her pet, are, in part, a cover for a desperate loneliness and dissociation from the opposite sex. As she later reports, other people (in particular, men) have hurt her in the past; dogs remain loyal.

     But one night even Pencil decides to escape the confines of her yard, going in search of other pleasures in the next door neighbor’s garage, where he evidently ingests some poisonous substance. Peggy hears the dog’s gasping cries the next morning as she awakens, and rushes the animal to a veterinarian, but it is too late: her beloved pet dies. With his death, her world collapses.

     Having met the next door bachelor (played by John C. Reilly) in her search for the dog, she accepts an invitation to dinner. His admission that he “accidentally” shot his childhood pet and that he gets “a rush” from hunting completely repels her, and by the end of the evening she is searching his garage to uncover what she almost seems to perceive as a “murder weapon.” In fact, the hole in the fence and her lack of insistence that the dog return home have been just as responsible for her animal’s death, but, like so many of us, in her sorrow she is unable to recognize her own culpability.

     Perceiving her distress, the veterinarian’s assistant, Newt (touchingly acted by Peter Sarsgaard), suggests she adopt one of his dogs, a formerly abused animal. His need to continue training it results in a friendship between the two. Peggy, it is clear, has found a soul mate and is so desperate to please him that she becomes, like him, a vegan, and quickly begins sharing his passion for helping all animals, including becoming involved in radical animal rights organizations and, against the directive of her boss, mixing those activities with her office work, which extends to signing business checks over to her new charities. Later, while babysitting her brother’s daughter and baby son, she absconds with the overprotected children, taking them on a visit to a farm that saves animals from slaughter, and then threatening to take her young niece to a local chicken manufacturer to witness the slaughterhouse events.

     Newt, moreover, cannot return her growing love for him. White subtly reveals all in a graceful aside: at the moment he is not ready for a girlfriend or even boyfriend, he tells her. He’s currently celibate. Clearly gay or bisexual, Newt has contracted AIDS or is HIV-positive. In his warning to Peggy that each household is allowed only three pets because the human heart is only able to love a few at a time, we recognize that either he or his former companion had perhaps once tried to embrace too many in their sexual activities.

     Newt’s warning is intentionally subtle, and Peggy clearly does not comprehend it. For suddenly, in her emptiness—particularly after her new dog kills one of Newt’s animals and he is compelled to have her pet euthanized—Peggy’s new passion for animals results in what could only be described as promiscuous behavior. A trip to the pound results in her bringing dozens of dogs home.

      Chaos results; her previously ordered existence is overturned with the animals’ literal destruction of her house. Meanwhile, her boss has discovered her fraudulent acts, and when she returns home after being fired, she discovers the city authorities have impounded her new pets. Once again, she blames her neighbor—although we know that Newt, in fact, is responsible for this act. Breaking into her neighbor’s garage Peggy discovers the source of Pencil’s death, a bag of snail poison.

     A kind of madness follows, as she pours the contents of the bag onto Al’s living room floor and grabs a knife from his special collection, lying in wait so that he, like the animals he has hunted, can know the fear of being stalked and murdered. Fortunately, the neighbor grapples her to the floor before she can cause any further damage.

     After a period of recuperation, her life resumes, her brother arranging for her company to reemploy her. Peggy survives the office atmosphere, however, only a few hours before escaping via bus to a new life, a life, which in its relation to animals, she now recognizes defines and fulfills her as a human being.

    In nearly all of the films written by Mike White, oddball characters gradually move from their obsessions to a recognition of their place in life, temporarily losing touch with reality only to later reintegrate themselves into the society at large. In White’s comic masterwork, Chuck and Buck, Buck—unable to separate boyhood male to male sexual groping with his friend Chuck from the fact that Chuck is now an adult heterosexual—believes he can win his former friend away from his current fiancée by presenting the “facts” within a play, revealing the “truth” through art. Obviously his truth is a false one. Only after stalking his ex-lover and insisting they engage in one more night of sexual intercourse does Buck gradually recognize the truth, allowing him  to find a fulfilling role in life.

     In the more mainstream School of Rock, Dewey Finn, kicked out of his heavy metal, rock band, attempts to use school children to return to fame; but in their developing musical abilities and struggle to win a local battle of bands, he rediscovers himself as a music teacher, founding a School of Rock.

     In Nacho Libre, a dissatisfied cook in a monastery escapes into the Mexican world of luchadores to become a wrestler, hoping to raise money for the orphans. Like Buck and Dewey he remains a loser, and when his identity is discovered he is ousted from the monastery; yet he redeems himself, not only by defeating the champion Ramses, but by reinventing and restoring his relationship with his former life, treating the orphans to field trips, accompanied by the beautiful Sister Encarnación.

     White’s new film, his directorial premiere, continues this pattern. In a time when many works of fiction and film embrace the outsider only to the mock the society at large, or cynically champion the society at the expense of those who cannot easily fit into its falsely ordered classifications, it is refreshing that White’s characters succeed in their struggles to have both unusual obsessions while embracing the everyday worlds around them.

 

Los Angeles, April 27, 2007

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (May 2007).

 

Julián Hernández | Bramadero / 2007

the ballet of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández (screenwriter and director) Bramadero / 2007 [22 minutes]

 

Since 1992 Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández has been writing, directing, and editing films so audacious in theme and so beautifully framed that he has come to be one of the major LGBTQ cinema masters, although to describe him as a primarily gay figure is to unnecessarily delimit his art. Influenced by directors as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, and Alain Resnais—among my favorites as well—his work no more needs the gay brackets around it than do these significant filmmakers need be described as heterosexuals—although Bresson perhaps was a closeted bisexual as well.

     And it is important to understand Hernández in the context in which he places himself, in the European tradition of serious arthouse filmmaking, as opposed to thinking of his work as being involved in the basically realist dramatic and comic traditions of many contemporary gay filmmakers. Hernández is a true Romantic at heart, embracing genres of science fiction, documentary art, and the popular romance genre itself.  And his films have the lush colors of film artists such Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, and Gregory Markopoulos.

      His early short film Bramadero, in fact, confused many viewers who immediately associated it with a kind of realism that we generally apply to pornography, albeit a beautifully filmed version of the usual gritty down-to-earth ménage of desire and copulation. That it was an arthouse-like depiction of gay sex, in fact, added to the critical furor, with as many commentators dismissing it as hothouse soft porn as others were outraged by what they saw as its straight-forward pornographic images. The film’s violent ending further put off many of its viewers who perceived the film as a kind of realist depiction of teenage gay lust, hinted at in its title, a bramadero being either a tethering post for tying up animals or a rutting-place of deer or other wild animals.

      The wild animals of Hernández’s film choose an unfinished high rise on the outskirts of Mexico City for their rutting spot, which contributes all the more to the notion that this is a real location where real gay youths come together to play out their desires.

      I think perhaps we might better understand this work, however, not as a serious LGBTQ film gone astray or even as Gay Celluloid described it, “a piece that boldly goes where no BBFC short has gone before!”; but rather as a cinematic ballet in the manner of Claire Denis’ 1996 film Beau Travail, or even before that, Norman McLaren’s 1983 dance performance Narcissus.

     It helps to realize that since his early 2000 film Rubato lamentoso, which consisted of two men dancing in the desert, the director has admitted to studying the code of dance as something to interpolate into his films. In his 2014 film, I Am Happiness on Earth, one of the three major actors, Alan Ramírez, is a professional dancer and a member of Mexico’s National Dance Company. And the central character of Young Man on the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve is also centrally a dancer, the fact of which becomes central to the action of the film.

     One might indeed break down the episodes of Bramadero into descriptive scenes that are played out often in dance-like gestures, the two boys circling around, towards, and away from one another before meeting head-on each time for the rutting pleasures. Course phrases such as “The Encounter” or “The Meet-up,” “The Investigation,” “Topping,” “Rejection,” “The Suck,” “The Rest,” “The Fuck,” “Transformation” and “Death” might almost be used to chart out the various moments in this sexual dance. These Tristan and Isolde-like figures spend almost as much time investigating each other as they do in actual engagement. And although their sexual actions are highly erotic, their acts of fellatio and anal penetration do not share any of the grunt and grind maneuvers of a gay porn movie. In the midst of ejaculation, the camera itself becomes a character, spinning and twirling externally through space, taking us with it, as fully as the two figures Jonás (Sergio Almazán) and Hassen (Cristhian Rodríguez) must feel internally, a device that certainly pulls us away, as do other brilliant camera movements, from the formulaic close-up, rack focus, and loop tape tricks of a porn film.

     Behind Hernández’s sexual dance, moreover, is the issue of dominance, much in the manner that the male and female partners in a traditional ballet fulfill. But here, with two males as dancing mates, there is a constant shifting of the positions that lead ultimately to that violent S&M like ending.

     A bit like the director’s later 2016 short, Boys on the Rooftop Hassen and Jonás begin with one, Hassen, as the bottom or passive figure, but throughout their various sexual encounters, shift roles as bottom becomes top, passive becomes dominant as they shift back again for the final brutal strangulation and slug fest. One might say that, as on stage, position is everything.

      If we perceive this work as a balletic metaphor for gay male sexuality, the attacks on its violence and pornographic depictions grow quite meaningless. Yes, these two figures reveal their sexual organs and engage in actual fellatio and copulation—in an interview with Paul Julian Smith in Film Quarterly, Hernández argues “I think if you trick the audience with fake sex this produces a rupture in the text of the film”—the goal of Bramadero, it is clear from the beginning, is not to provide its viewers with an erection and a quick jack-off experience.

     This film, through its highly gestural actions, provides us instead with a layered statement about desire and lust, how the feelings of the individual shift into a physical and almost spiritual dual embodiment of sensation and love before returning us each into our own selves. Not so very different from Wagner after all, but strangely from a much more analytical perspective, Hernández reveals the fears, pleasures, and finally terrors of encountering, losing oneself, and finally losing the other that good sex ultimately entails.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

 

Michael Serrato and Tom Goss | Son of a Preacher Man / 2016 [music video]

response to the corinthians

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Goss and Michael Serrato (screenplay), Michael Serrato (director) Son of a Preacher Man / 2016 [6 minutes] [music video]

 

Tom Goss’ and Michael Serrato’s musical revision of the Dusty Springfield standard is both a music video and a film narrative that explores another set of possibilities of the seemingly heterosexual song.

     Oddly, and absolutely incorrectly, IMDb identifies this work—a strange one for them to even include since they basically do not catalogue music videos—as being “a strictly anti-homosexual film concerning a pastor and his son who is love with his male friend.”

     Yes, the work begins with a conservative minister, the father of Billy Ray (Kevin Norman), reading from First Corinthians about the evils of “homosexuality”—a true mistranslation and misunderstanding of the original since the ancient writers did not even have such a concept in their vocabulary, and the concept and word “homosexuality” came into the human language only in the late 19th century—yet even that scene is quite undermined by the eye contact between the preacher’s son Billy Ray and Tom. And seconds later the older Tom (Goss) begins the song that tells of the two boys’ love for one another.

Billy Ray was the preacher's son

And when his daddy would visit he'd come along

When they gathered 'round and started talkin'

That's when Billy would take me walkin'

Out through the back yard we'd go walkin'

Then he'd look into my eyes

Lord knows, to my surprise

 

The only one who could ever reach me

Was the son of a preacher man

The only boy who could ever teach me

Was the son of a preacher man

Yes, he was, he was, ooh, yes, he was

Being good isn't always easy

No matter how hard I try

When he started sweet-talkin' to me

He'd come and tell me "Everything is alright"

He'd kiss and tell me "Everything is alright"

Can I get away again tonight?

     Goss’ version is vastly slowed down, and much more in the tradition of a sung rural narrative as opposed to the jubilant church choir shout of the Springfield tune. For Goss the song becomes almost a somewhat frightening lament that eventually becomes quite wonderfully liberating and ironic at the end when after both boys, having been discovered kissing and after severely being punished and prayed over by their religious parents, come to realize the bigotry and narrowmindedness of the world in which they live.

     At this point in Goss’ rendition the orchestra momentarily takes over creating a far more dissonant and experimental work that challenges the lovely simplicity of the earlier tune. And momentarily, in visual terms, suicide is even contemplated, surely not something the sweet young girl of Springfield’s version could have imagined.

     But, in the end, these two boys come back together, embrace within the church and walk out hand-in-hand, presumably free of the religious homophobia they are leaving behind.

     Goss’ work was sponsored by the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention program for youth.

     In short, the film by Goss and Michael Serrato turns the country song on its head by first inverting it and then making love win out over the hate of the church itself. The opposite of being “anti-homosexual,” it celebrates the boy’s gay romance and challenges the adults to rethink their narrow-mindedness. Although heart-breaking in the fact of how their innocent love was torn asunder by the adult world, it is, in fact, celebratory as the boys perceive their love for one another as being of greater importance than their obedience to religious prejudice. In the end, they literally run off with joy to their new world. The preacher’s son has indeed taught Tom about love.

     As critic Glenn Garner writes in Out, “…the ending provides more home than could be expected.” I would argue, however, that the ending is what should be expected and is precisely what this music video promotes.

     Writing in The Daily Beast Tim Teeman observes:

 

“In singer-songwriter Tom Goss’s moving and beautifully composed torch-song reversioning of ‘Preacher Man,’ the song takes on a darker hue featuring a forbidden gay love affair. The song immediately caused an online flurry of comment when it surfaced a couple of days ago.

     Here, falling for the preacher’s son means two teenage boys run smack up against vicious, evangelical homophobia. The video takes in young love, attempted suicide, parental rejection, religious judgment, and—hurrah—uplifting survival.”

 

     Popular gay singer and queer advocate Goss commented of this work in The Huffington Post: “The story of the video is one that hits home to me. I spent 18 months in seminary following college before I realized I was gay. I also attempted suicide when I was 13. (Goss reports swallowed a bottle of pills, immediately regretted it and told his mother who rushed him off to the hospital). Although it was for different reasons, it’s a place that I’ve been.” And Serrato evidently really did fall in love with a preacher’s son.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).